I've discovered a few references suggesting how an RPi might possibly be used to display a simple image (e.g., PNG or JPG), but nothing from anyone who's actually succeeded doing it.

Whatever the mysterious approach might be, it must be usable with the QEMU emulator for debugging purposes. The goal, for those wondering, is to display four images of numbers in a row against a clock image (or, possibly, video) background to simulate a digital clock. Don't care if it's within the X UI or not.

i installed imagemagick and fim packages for the pi. fim is fbi improved. haven't had a chance to try it on the pi, yet, but i had some encouraging playtime this morning on the train with fbi on my laptop.

another thing you might try in x would be processing. it's basically just a preprocessor and a ton of libraries on top of java. it looks like it has a full screen library.

"If I had known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself." - Phillip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

are you running qemu because you've been unable to get hold of a pi, or is this strictly and academic exercise? in either case, i can't say that i know much about it. installation on the pi would be as follows...

apt-get is a front end to the debian package manager. (oops, i guess i'm assuming that you're emulating one of the debian installations for the pi.) it takes care of package dependencies, so if something you want to install requires the presence of some other package or some library it makes sure that everything is in place.

apt-get update updates the package lists on the pi so that you get access to the latest stuff in the repositories.

apt-get install will install the named package and whatever dependencies are necessary.

best of luck.

"If I had known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself." - Phillip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly